The Marvel Universe doesn’t lack realities, dimensions, and other parallel Earths. But one is particularly famous as it has been firmly tied to the Fantastic Four for decades now: The Negative Zone.
First introduced in Fantastic Four #51 (published in 1966) by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, the Negative Zone is an antimatter universe–a universe parallel to Earth’s in which all matter is negatively charged. As such, it is a dangerous place for those who come from the regular Marvel Universe, those who are positive matter beings. It’s not immediately dealy for them, but being there for a prolonged period of time is quite dangerous.
First published in 1982 by Comico, in Comico Primer #2, Grendel is a creation of Matt Wagner that started as something highly usual at the time. Inspired by Diabolik, Kriminal, Elric, the Beowulf myth, and more, this was the story of an anti-hero, Hunter Rose, an assassin turned mob boss whose Nemesis was Argent the wolf–a powerful and terrifying man-wolf.
The story of this master criminal would soon be retold in Devil by the Deed as a backup story in Wagner’s other series, Mage.
Grendel would eventually become an ongoing series at Comico, from 1986 to 1990. Instead of bringing back Hunter Rose, inspired by the generational aspects of The Phantom, Wagner decided to create a collection of stories exploring the influence of the Grendel identity. The first was Christine Spar, the daughter of Stacy Palumbo who played an integral part in Hunter Rose’s life, then Brian Li Sung who was for a time involved with Christine. After that, Wagner started to adopt a different angle, revisiting Hunter Rose’s career before going progressively into the future.
Continuously evolving, Grendel became a sci-fi story about a dystopic future where a corrupt religious society is disrupted by a powerful Vigilante dressed as Grendel. This led to a revolution and a new status quo as the power shifted and the spirit of Grendel pushed the whole imagery of the Grendel to evolve again. Then emerged the powerful and mysterious Grendel Prime.
As Comico went into bankruptcy in 1990, Grendel’s story was interrupted, but Matt Wagner moved it creation to Dark Horse Comics. Since then, he published new series and revisited old ones, coming back to it multiple times through the years.
Today is Batman Day!One of the most popular comic book characters, Batman needs no introduction. Since his first appearance in May 1939, the Caped Crusader has investigated crimes of various natures, ranging from murder and theft to supernatural occurrences. Originally conceived as an heir to the pulp heroes, Batman has evolved over time, gradually softening and refining into the hero we know today.
The world of Batman expanded with more team-ups, new villains and allies, and iconic stories. His adventures have been chronicled in ongoing series, annuals, miniseries, maxiseries, one-shots, graphic novels, and every other format imaginable. Over the years, DC Comics has collected many of these tales, story arcs, crossovers, and runs in various formats, including the famous Omnibus line.
With a growing collection of Omnibus editions dedicated to Batman (and his extended family), we have decided to create a specific Batman Omnibus Reading Order. This guide can serve as a roadmap to explore the world of the Dark Knight, helping both new and seasoned readers discover more about the World’s Greatest Detective!
Young Frank Miller wasn’t working at Marvel for very long when he saw an opportunity to do a crime comic with Daredevil. After drawing two issues of Spectacular Spider-Man guest-starring Daredevil, he requested to work on the Daredevil title. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, as artist Gene Colan wanted to leave Daredevil. While Miller hadn’t yet proven his ability to handle a regular commitment at this stage, as he remembers in The Comics Journal #70, Marvel took a gamble on him, and it paid off.
However, success didn’t arrive with his first Daredevil issue. Initially, Miller only drew the stories, with Roger McKenzie as the writer (and Klaus Janson as the inker). While both men didn’t always agree on everything, they worked well together and conspired to “steal away as many Spider-Man villains as we could.” But sales weren’t improving. Things turned around with the arrival of Denny O’Neil as editor on the title. Following a backup story written by Miller, O’Neil put the artist on writing duties, and the rest is history.
Influenced by Will Eisner, Gil Kane, Harvey Kurtzman, and film techniques, Miller made a name for himself through his care for research and his exploration of darker themes—violence being a major theme of his Daredevil run. He also decided to emphasize that Matt Murdock was a Catholic, as, for him, “only a Catholic could be a vigilante and an attorney at the same time.” (The Men Without Fear: Creating Daredevil, 2003 documentary). He took the time to clearly define the parameters of Daredevil’s powers to make them more believable. He added some martial arts to Daredevil’s fighting skills and introduced Elektra in Daredevil #168 in his first issue as main writer. As Klaus Janson put it, the arrival of Elektra was “the culmination of Frank’s intent to rebuild Daredevil and his supporting cast.”
Following in the footsteps of French publisher Urban Comics and its ‘Urban Nomad’ collection, DC Comics has recently started to release a new line of graphic novels called DC Compact Comics. The concept? A new-reader-friendly collection at a good price that you can take with you everywhere!
What is the DC Comics Compact Edition?
Launched in June 2024 with the ultimate classic DC Comics (and best-seller of all time!) Watchmen, the new DC Compact Comics line is designed to appeal to prose and manga readers with a smaller format than the traditional 6 5/8″ x 10 3/16″. Featuring a 5.5″ x 8.5″ standard book trim—the most widely circulated softcover size in the US—DC wants to attract new readers by offering iconic stories in a more portable and affordable format. With a price point of $9.99, these compact editions deliver a full-color self-contained, best-selling DC stories that you can take with you everywhere!
Spanning stories from many genres, such as science fiction, thrillers, horror, fantasy, adventure, and mystery, the DC Compact Comics line will introduce readers to Green Lantern Sojourner “Jo” Mullein with Far Sector, a sci-fi murder mystery on the other side of the universe, or revisit the myth of Superman with the multiple-award-winning All-Star Superman. While the emphasis is put on self-contained stories, the release of American Vampire Book One shows that the collection isn’t limited to one-off tales but also serves as an opportunity to collect long-running series.Read More »DC Compact Comics: Your Guide to the Upcoming Graphic Novel Releases (2024-2025)
Originally published by Marvel Comics’ Icon imprint before being moved to Image Comics, Criminal is a long-running creator-owned comic book series by writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips (the duo behind Reckless). It has become the most prominent independent crime comic of the last twenty years.
Launched in 2006, Criminal started as a ten-issue series before coming back in multiple formats through the years, from graphic novel to one-shot. Every storyline works as a standalone story that takes place in a much larger narrative–mostly articulated around the Lawless Family and the mob boss Sebastian Hyde.
As a crime comic series, Brubaker and Phillips’ creation explores the many forms of the genre. In an interview with Tom Spurgeon at the launch of the series, Brubaker stated “The kinds of stories we’ll be putting all these characters through, though, run the gamut from the heist caper, to the revenge story, to the man on the run story, and even beyond that to the sort of meta-noir innocent man caught in a web of crime story.” That’s exactly what they did.
Eighteen years later, we have a collection of books, stories that were not written or published in chronological order, featuring a group of recurring characters whose lives we discover through dark and violent events. The following guide is here to help you find the stories you may have missed and to offer multiple ways to read them.
Not to be confused with DC’s Deadshot or Deathstroke, Deathlok is a Marvel Comics character. In fact, it’s the codename of more than one character. The First one was created by cartoonist Rich Buckler in Astonishing Tales #25 (he plotted and pencilled it, Doug Moench wrote the script and suggested the name), in 1974, the same year as The Punisher and Wolverine. Marvel was into violent warriors at the time and The Six Million Dollar Man TV Show had popularized the concept of a cyborg just a few months earlier.
Known at first as Deathlok the Demolisher, Luther Manning was an American soldier who was killed and subsequently brought back to life by Simon Ryker who transformed him into a cyborg. This takes place in a dystopian future: 1990. He escaped Ryker’s control and fought against him, up until the end of his Astonishing Tales run when he was sent back in time to the regular Marvel timeline. This was only the beginning for him as he got to meet other Marvel heroes, and eventually went back to his timeline.
Manning was just the first. Through the years, Michael Collins, Jack Truman, Rebecca Ryker, Henry Hayes, and Jemma Simmons used the “Deathlok” identity. They mostly followed the same route, dead humans reanimated as cyborgs.
Thanks to the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel Across the Spider-Verse, it is no secret that the Marvel Universe contains an infinite number of versions of Spider-Men, Spider-Women, and Spider-villains.
Before Miles Morales and company web-slung onto the big screen, a Spider-Army was created on the pages of Marvel Comics. During the Spider-Verse event, their mission was to protect the Spiders from the Inheritors, a vampiric family who hunt Spider-Totems to access what is called the Web of Life and Destiny, which can be described as a celestial map of the multiverse – and with Spiders created to repair, maintain, and expand it.
Launched as a minor feature in Police Comics #1 in 1941 (originally published by Quality Comics and later acquired by DC Comics), Plastic Man is a creation of artist and writer Jack Cole. He initially thought of a character named the Indian Rubber Man, inspired by sideshow freaks, but Everett Arnold–who was the founder of Quality Comics–suggested naming the character after that material that was all the rage at the time.
According to Art Spiegelman, who profiled Cole for The New Yorker magazine, in 1943, when Plastic Man expanded into his own book, Cole explained the morphing hero to new readers: “If you should see a man standing on the street and reaching into the top window of a sky-scraper…that’s not astigmatism—it’s Plastic Man!… If you happen upon a gent all bent up like a pretzel…don’t dunk him…it’s Plastic Man! All this and bouncing too, you’ll see when the rubber man and his pal Woozy Winks gamble their lives in—The Game of Death.”
This is the story of Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, a lowlife gangster. While committing a robbery, he was accidentally doused by some unnamed acid. Nursed back to health by a reclusive order of monks, Eel became a new man. He now had stretching abilities that defied the laws of physics and, inspired by the teaching of the monks, he was now ready to put his criminal past behind him to protect the law–he first helped the police force and later became a special agent for the F.B.I.
In 1972, as the Comics Code started to loosen and Stan Lee became Marvel’s Publisher, making Roy Thomas the new editor-in-chief, Marvel launched new horror titles like Ghost Rider, The Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night, and The Tomb of Dracula.
Written by Gerry Conway, plotted by Roy Thomas, and drawn by Gene Colan (who fought to get this assignment), The Tomb of Dracula #1 introduced the famous vampire created by author Bram Stoker into the Marvel Universe. The concept seduced the readers, but the writing not that much. Conway rapidly left the book, Archie Goodwin then Gardner Fox took over for only two issues each before Marv Wolfman assumed the writing duties and received critical success–he also introduced Blade and other vampire hunters.
Like most of Marvel’s horror books, The Tomb of Dracula was not part of the Marvel Universe until issue #44 which was a crossover with Doctor Stange (concluding in issue #14 of the Sorcerer Supreme’s series). The series ended with over-sized issue #70 but was quickly revived as a black & white magazine. That didn’t last.
Some of The Tomb of Dracula‘s characters came back in regular Marvel books like Doctor Strange. Dracula himself reappeared with Rachel Van Helsing in 1982 in Chris Claremont’s X-Men. Then in 1991, The Tomb of Dracula was revived for a 4-part miniseries. A few years later, Dracula came back in more Marvel series. Since then, he occasionally appeared in stand-alone stories or full storylines, finding a place in the Marvel Universe.
